This invention relates to a process for treating waste material and more particularly to a process for treating waste material such as commercial, industrial, agricultural, household and restaurant waste for the recovery of useful organic and inorganic matter contained therein, and with a specific object of preparing the separated organic matter for the production of ethanol.
Heretofore, various methods have been devised for the treatment and disposal of waste material including landfill, ocean dumping, composting, heat treatment and incineration. Also, waste food scraps from commercial catering establishments have in the past been fed to animals as a method of disposal, but in recent years this has been discouraged due to the fear of introducing disease to such animals. With the tremendous increase in the volume of waste produced, such methods have become environmentally unsafe, inefficient and very expensive.
Furthermore, conventional recycling processes used in cooperation with such disposal methods only separate out the solids from the remainder of the waste and reduce the size thereof for the recovery of ferrous metals and other useful solids such as glass and the like contained therein. This may be accomplished by subjecting the solids to magnets for the recovery of ferrous metals or by subjecting them to crushers and hammer mills for size reduction. Also, the solids may be passed through fluids moving at various speeds whereby they are separated and classified according to density and aerodynamic qualities. Such conventional recovery processes have only achieved limited success due to the fact that they recover only limited amounts of reusable material with waste material still remaining for disposal.